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Despite the spinnaker incident, we had a great time sailing over from Panama. The winds were better than expected. We only reefed our Genoa once, and we did use our screecher a lot. It’s kind of interesting because you may be getting an apparent wind speed of, say, 8 knots from 130 degrees off your port side. But once you get the screecher up, the boat starts moving faster forward and that forward momentum clocks the wind vector around to about 80 or 90 degrees, and then your apparent wind speed starts to increase up to 12 or 14 knots. Very cool. The winds did drop at night and a few times got under 5 knots, so once our speed dropped to about 3 knots (or our autopilot started having trouble steering) we rolled the headsail in and motored.

We calculated that we only used about 30 gallons of fuel over 5.81 days.

As for wildlife, we saw dolphins our first few days, and even two whales. One whale was REALLY close to us but he didn’t surface again that we could see. The other one was far off, only identifiable from its spout. We did have a lot of birds though! Thursday night a red-footed booby camped out on our port bow cleat for 12 hours, and Friday night, a frigate stubornly clung to the top of our mast. We were worried that the frigate was going to take down our wind vane, and of course Starry Horizons has a lot of bird poop goin’ on right now…

We arrived Saturday morning to Academy Bay, Santa Cruz. We had our anchor down by 8 am, and I set to work baking brownies and cleaning up. We had kept in touch with our agent, Johnny Romero, via sat phone emails and he was expected in the morning. There are several cruising boats here, but it is not crowded. We have read that a stern anchor is recommended but we aren’t using one (yet). We don’t think anyone else here is either. There are a few boats here that we recognize, although no one we know. We had also read that the anchorage is rolly with lots of traffic, but so far nothing we can’t handle.

Formalities kicked off with Johnny arriving via water taxi. One by one our officials arrived in the same manner. We had a total of five men onboard. Everyone was offered (and accepted) bottles of water and brownies. We make sure to have bottled water onboard for officials, a top from our Agent in Panama, Roy, because the officials are greeting on strange boats all the time, and they don’t know how that boat got their water; via water maker or municipal, and what’s the quality?

In the group was Johnny, two Ecuadorian Coast Gaurd men, an environmental and agriculture guy, and a ‘diver’. Johnny helped us translate, and the CG and ag guys worked on the paperwork simultaneously. The CG guys asked to see navigation equipment and safety equipment. We showed them all our electronics at the helm station, and pulled out fire blankets, life rings, life jackets, and our medical kit.

The agriculture guy went down into our starboard side and poked a vacuum around in a few places to check for infestations. We also got a fumigation certificate from Panama, although the certificate doesn’t actually mean that you got fumigated. (Weird, right?)

The ‘diver’ was actually a guy with snorkel gear and a go pro. He got in the water and swam up and down the waterline looking at the bottom of our boat. Since our bottom job in Nanny Cay, we’ve only had to clean the bottom gently three times. Once was in Grenada and then twice were in Panama – when we first got to Las Perlas and then just before we left. We knew that they are looking for invasive species, primarily, but we were concerned about general cleanliness too. At some point on our passage we went through some muck, and while the bottom is clean, the waterline has some nasty stuff on it. But, no worries, we passed our inspection – if you don’t pass they make you go back out to sea and have the bottom cleaned professionally.

It’s hard to tell what the formalities would have been like if we didn’t have a (relatively) shiny and new boat. I’m sure the agriculture inspection would have been more thorough, since older boats are more likely to have infestations. We also were asked if we have any live animals or plants aboard, but there was no inspection of our provisions or alcohol. David and I have been eating a lot of our tuna lately, as we had heard that you can not have recently caught fish onboard. We still have two loins in our freezer from the Caribbean Sea, but no one seemed concerned.

Noonsite was very helpful for our planning of the formalities. I also read any blog post I could find of cruisers stopping in the Galapagos. But, a lot of things were wrong. For example, we had read that your clearance papers from Panama need to say your next port is French Polynesia. Not true, our exit papers say Galapagos. We have a 20-day, one island permit to visit the Galapagos. That means that Starry Horizons will stay here for up to 20 days, but we will travel to the other islands through other means. You can get a cruising permit for longer, but it’s more expensive, so we are just going to try to pack everything we want to do into less than 20 days. We had read online that as of 2016 this 20-day option was no longer available. I was also told that by an agent that I had contacted before we booked Johnny.

Friday night after dinner we turned on our underwater lights. At first, we got a lot of small fish, but then we spotted about half a dozen two-foot long black tip reef sharks circling around the lights. A pelican joined in, coming really close to us and clacking its bill at us.

Then, I heard someone take a deep breath in between our hulls. I actually said “David?” as if he may have jumped in without me noticing. Swimming out from between the hulls was a sea lion! This happened several times, as they seem to like coming up in between the hulls for a breather before racing off to eat more fish.

Sea lions are notorious in the area for boarding boats and making a mess. All boats with a transom use fenders to block off access. We blocked off the port side completely, and blocked the starboard side at the top of the steps. We were hoping to give the sea lions a restricted area to come visit us; hopefully to confine their mess to the starboard transom.

David woke up first Saturday and when I got upstairs, he said that apparently our fender blockade didn’t work.

“Do we have a sea lion back there??”

“You are looking the wrong way. ”

Guess who was hanging out on our trampoline??

Apparently we had a weak link in the blockade. The sea lion was like a sun bathing cat; he occasionally opened his eyes and looked at us but didn’t seem to care too much.

We needed a generator day and David had plans to wash the boat. We thought we’d have to shoo the sea lion off the trampoline. I was hoping to get to see him waddle back to the stern but once David turned on the generator the sea lion slipped under the seagull striker and flopped into the water.

David washed the boat and we waited for Johnny to come back with our passports. He did a water taxi drive by to tell us they were delayed (understandable, as it’s Easter Sunday) and he’d be by Monday.

Sunday was actually our anniversary! Six year of marriage and my how far we have come! We celebrated with a lazy afternoon of reading, a steak dinner, and more entertainment by the lights of our stern. We didn’t see as many fish, but definitely more sharks – about 12!

We’ve found that we have free wifi here – the network called Sopla Por la Education provides 45 minutes of free internet every 24 hours. We connect to our wifi extender and the signal is ok – slow to load and not fast enough for calls or uploading videos. Our laptops can also see it, so that’s another 45 minutes for each laptop but the lower signal makes it even slower. And, if I stand outside I can get terribly slow signal that occasionally disappears with my cell phone.

Water taxis are prolific, and cost between 80 cents or 1 dollar per trip, depending on the time of day. They have a few socks they can take you to, or pick you up from your boat. You can hail water taxis on channel 14.

I have been doing lots of research on TripAdvisor and talking now to other travelers. I think we picked the right place to come into. There’s a lot to do here – the Darwin Research Station, several beaches, diving and more! Can’t wait to get out and explore!

Sea Lions on Deck!

Thursday morning I woke up at 2:30 am to hear some unusual noises. Every morning we’ve woken up to find that a sea lion has outsmarted us and climbed over our fender blockade to hang out in our trampoline. And, to add insult to injury, they leave before we wake up so we end up with all the mess and no cute sea lion to fawn over.

Super cute but stinky.

So, 2:30, I’m up, and find a sea lion vigorously rubbing herself on our trampoline. She’s also left a giant “present” on our port side stairs. First order of business is getting her off the boat, which is attempted by extending our boat hook as far as possible, leaning (naked might I add) out of our forward hatch and trying to poke her. When that doesn’t work, I launch the boat hook like a javelin and off she goes. I clean up the mess with water and a brush. When the mess is left to sit, it won’t come out with any of the gentler deck cleaners, so we (read: David) have to soft scrub it out. Thankfully my nighttime proactivness greatly reduced the clean up required in the morning, and a shuffling of fenders (hopefully) dissuaded another sea lion visit.

Underwater Lights

Tuesday David had a headache (too much sun), so we stayed on the boat for a quiet day. We were also told that we aren’t allowed to use our underwater lights. That was a big bummer, and I’m not entirely sure why, since the city docks have underwater lights on them as well.

Preparing to Depart

The rest of our visit here was fairly laid back and quiet. Unfortunately, we had some communication issues with our agent, Johnny, about understanding how we can accomplish a few things and leave. While some of the communication issues were on Johnny’s part, the big one was that all of a sudden, his emails started getting put in my spam box. He was answering my questions, but I wasn’t seeing it. I would have liked to make it to Isabela Island for a few nights, but we weren’t able to make it happen.

While I’ve heard a lot of different things about the other islands you can go to (San Cristobal has sea lions like the plague and Isabela is remote and beautiful) I think we picked the right one. Although I am sad we didn’t get to snorkel Las Tuneles on Isabela, we get to snorkel all the time. Our adventures in Santa Cruz were truly unique to the Galapagos. We won’t have many opportunities to experience diving with hammerhead sharks, swimming a natural fissure like Las Grietas, or walking through a lava tunnel.

Today we have winds cooperating to get down south. We are taking off this afternoon, and expect to be at sea around 20 days. Our next port will be Hiva Oa, French Polynesia.

About the Author

Amy's family has a long, storied history on the water! Her dad and grandpa both owned maritime companies, and after her father's death, Amy ran the business. Amy picked up sailing from her dad, and she takes her credit for getting David into it! After selling everything, she's now the Admiral, Chef, Social Coordinator and First Mate aboard Starry Horizons!

Sometimes your wireless bridges on some boats can alter their mac address. A lot of the time limit internet services track computers by their mac addresses. It’s called mac cloning. You can change your mac every 45 minutes and reconnect.

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